Archive for July 26, 2011

Scientists at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel have discovered the process through which memories are made and then recalled. These scientists have recorded that How individual brain cells calls up a memory?, thus revealing where in the brain a specific memory is stored and how the brain is able to recreate it.

Dr. ITZHAK FRIED

Dr. Itzhak Fried, Senior Study Suthor and a UCLA Professor of Neurosurgery with his colleagues recorded the activity of hundreds of individual neurons making memories in the brains of 13 epilepsy patients being treated surgically at UCLA Medical Center. Their research detail has been reported in current online edition of the Journal Science.

EXPERIMENT

Surgeons at UCLA Medical Center placed electrodes in the patients’ brains to locate the origin of their seizures before surgical treatment which is a standard procedure in such cases. Dr. Fried used same electrodes to record the neuron activity as memories were being formed.

During the experiment patients were shown several video clips of short duration, including such things as landmarks and people, along with other clips of Jerry Seinfeld, Tom Cruise, “Simpsons” character Homer Simpson and others. As the patients watched these clips, researchers recorded the activity of many neurons in the Hippocampus and a nearby region known the Entorhinal Cortex that responded strongly to individual clips.

Few minutes after watching these clips, the patients were asked to recall whatever clips came to mind. During this recalling process these patients were not prompted to recall any specific clips,” but to use “free recall’ which means, whatever popped into their heads.

At this point researchers found that the same neurons that had responded earlier to a specific clip fired strongly a second or two before the subject reported recalling that clip. These neurons did not fire, however,when other clips were recalled. By observing this researchers found that which clip a patient was recalling before the patient announced it.

During this experiment Dr. Fried noted that the single neurons that were recorded as they fired were not acting alone but were part of a much larger memory circuit of hundreds of thousands of cells caught in the act of responding to the clips.

SIGNIFICANCE

This research is significant in the fact that it confirms for the first time that spontaneous memories arise through the activity of the very same neurons that fired when the memory was first being made. This link between reactivation of neurons in the Hippocampus and conscious recall of past experience has been suspected and theorized for sometime, but the study now provides direct evidence for this.

So we can say that, Reliving past experience in our memory is the resurrection of neuronal activity from the past.

FUNDING

The research was funded by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, as well as the Israel Science Foundation and the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation.

DESCRIBING objects is so much easier when you use your hands, the classic being “the fish was this big“.

For humans, it’s easy to understand what is meant, but computers struggle, and existing gesture-based interfaces only use set movements that translate into particular instructions. Now a system called Data Miming can recognise objects from gestures without the user having to memorise a “vocabulary” of specific movements.

“Starting from the observation that humans can effortlessly understand which objects are being described when hand motions are used, we asked why computers can’t do the same thing,” says Christian Holz of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany who developed the system with Andy Wilson at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.

Holz observed how volunteers described objects like tables or chairs using gestures, by tracing important components repeatedly with their hands and maintaining relative proportions throughout their mime.

Data Miming uses a Microsoft Kinect motion-capture camera to create a 3D representation of a user’s hand movements. Voxels, or pixels in three dimensions, are activated when users pass their hands through the space represented by each voxel. And when a user encircles their fingers to indicate a table leg, say, the system can also identify that all of the enclosed space should be included in the representation. It then compares user-generated representations with a database of objects in voxel form and selects the closest match.

In tests the system correctly recognised three-quarters of descriptions, and the intended item was in the top three matches from its database 98 per cent of the time. Holz presented his findings at the CHI 2011 meeting in Vancouver, Canada, in May.

The system could be incorporated into online shopping so users could gesture to describe the type of product they want and have the system make a suggestion. Or, says Holz: “Imagine you want a funky breakfast-bar stool. Instead of wandering around and searching Ikea for half an hour, you walk up to an in-store kiosk and describe the stool using gestures, which takes seconds. The computer responds immediately, saying you probably want the Funkomatic Breakfast Stool-o-rama, and it lives in row 7a.”

Kinect Motion Capture

Many motion capture applications keeps coming for kinect. Kinect motion capture system cab used by 3d applications for capturing motions for 3d animation softwares like motionbuilder, 3ds max, maya, poser, blender etc., And there are two successful motion capture applications using kinect motion sensor which enables animators to setup their own motion capture studio.

IPiSoft Kinect Motion Capture Application

Ipisoft comes with a first commercial kinect motion capture software. ipisoft released its desktop motion capture software a year ago. It uses markerless motion capture technology. You just need to record a video using webcam or their suggested sony play station eye for better results. Then their software process the video and converts it to motion capture files. Output supports various mocap formats- Biovision .BVH format including 3DS MAX .BVH,MotionBuilder .BVH,Endorphin .BVH,iClone .BVH,Blender .BVH, FBX,COLLADA (.dae),Valve Software’s Source Engine animation .SMD